Summer holidays have now been and gone, and following a two day drive passing through nine European countries (from now on my family can be known as the Griswolds), we spent our holiday in Italy, at beautiful Lake Garda. While planning our summer holidays last year, with two other families, the men decided that while in Italy we’d try our luck and cycle up the Stelvio Pass, the second highest mountain pass in the Alps, and regularly used in the Giro d’Italia annual cycle race. We didn’t plan our exact cycle route until we were in Italy, but we decided upon attempting not one but two ascents of the summit – a total of 64 miles of cycling and a whopping 11,254 ft (3,430 metres) of climbing. We did a practice cycle ride a couple of days before Stelvio, and I ended up ordering some new brake pads from Amazon Prime as I wasn’t happy with my current ones, and I didn’t fancy dying on any descent down the mountain due to lack of stopping power!

The day of the ride came, and after a three hour drive to get to the start, we set off. One of us ended up hiring an e-bike in Italy, as he hadn’t done as much practice as me and my other friend, but this proved to be his undoing, as his battery ran out on the first ascent!

We decided to leave him pushing his bike to the summit, while we continued down to Switzerland and around for the second ascent. This ended up being a climb of unbearable pain and suffering, quite possibly the toughest cycling challenge I have ever undertaken. The views, however, were incredible, and worth all the agony, although our e-bike friend didn’t quite agree, as he was left waiting for us at the freezing summit for a number of hours!

The descent down back to where we started from a number of hours earlier was also much fun, and I was thankful that I had changed my brake pads, or else everything could’ve ended up quite differently…

So, my Unicef fundraising cycling challenges are now at an end, and I really must do a few practice walks and break my new walking boots in, as it is only a month until I meet my Team Ubuntu teammates and we undertake our Lake District challenge. Onwards and upwards!